Henk Pander’s memories of Nazi occupation

Dutch-born Henk Pander lived his early childhood in occupied Holland, an experience he has captured in his work

The painter Henk Pander was born in Haarlem, in The Netherlands, in 1937.

That meant he was three years old when the Nazi occupation of that city began in 1940 and eight, when it finally ended in 1945. The “Hunger Winter” of 1944-45 was especially bad. Food was scarce; the Nazi occupiers and their Dutch collaborators were desperate to find resources, human and otherwise, to keep the war going; it was an extremely cold winter.

That winter the Nazis came for his father, who managed to escape. But would he be able to escape the next time?

Henk Pander, “The Floor”“On our street another large family was involved in the resistance. There were routine house searches. People hid between the joists under the floors. The wife pretended to be ill. I tried to make these works from a child’s point of view.”

That profound experience of occupation stayed with Pander as he grew up in Holland, training to be an artist, as his father was. A primary lesson: “The government can walk into your world without hesitation,” Pander says. When he arrived in Portland in 1965, after marrying an American and starting a family, he brought that sensitivity to the coercive power of government. And he saw that power exercised in Portland, in response to the anti-Vietnam War protests of the time. He drew, painted and caricatured that Portland, and continues the practice of capturing the world around him—animated by his classical Dutch art training—to this day. From a purely documentary viewpoint alone, that work is fascinating—among the most important contributions to our understanding of Portland, Oregon, and America that I know of—even before we start to interpret it.

What that little boy witnessed in Haarlem between 1940 and 1945 became another vector of exploration. After seeing an Anselm Kiefer mixed-media painting show in Paris in 1984, a mediation on World War II and the Holocaust, Pander filled several drawing books with his memories of the war.
And then between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, he started painting them. I would suggest that those memories haunt much of Pander’s work, but these paintings allow us to see, feel, and experience what life under Nazi occupation was like. At the same time, they operate on a metaphorical level, too, the level of nightmare. Art historian Roger Hull calls them “among Pander’s most moving and profound accomplishments,” in the catalog essay for the Pander retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem.

Pander isn’t given to euphemism. “I again live in a Fascist period,” he says of this time. He’s not talking about Obamacare, and he’s not being metaphorical.

During the recent election, I heard the words “Nazi” and “Fascist” used more frequently than I had since my childhood, when they were used mostly to describe actual Nazis and Fascists from the recently concluded war. Mostly, the words were used loosely, I thought. Trump supporters used them, and so did Clinton supporters, neither side making a particularly coherent argument in the process, partly because the definitions of those words are contested and complicated, far more than our political conversation can handle at this perilous point. What is the proper application? I’m not a political scientist, but perhaps experiences like the ones Pander painted.

It’s possible that these paintings seem a long way from your everyday life in Portland; for some, though, they may capture the essence of it, especially if they are at Standing Rock right now. At the very least, they serve as a warning: We do not want this in Portland, in Oregon, in America, not for ourselves and not for anyone else.

Pander contributed the captions for these paintings.

Henk Pander, “Hiding”
“On December 6, 1944, the Germans blocked all roads out of the city of Haarlem. Then went house-to-house to find all men under 40 and force them to work as slave laborers in German factories. My father fled out of the back garden and hid with neighbors in the dark basements of a nearby Catholic church.”

Henk Pander, “Ruse”
“As my father fled, my mother sat in front of the window with my week-old baby brother, Jan, to deflect the Nazis. We as children were told to tell the soldiers that our father was in Germany. This happened during the famine of 1944-45. The child with the empty pan represents that.”

Henk Pander, “Burying the Silver”
“The Nazis were running out of bullets. They forced the Dutch to give up their copper, pewter and other metals. My parents buried the kettles, the silver, the teapot in the backyard to be retrieved after the war.”

Henk Pander, “The Floor”: Memories of the Nazi occupation years in Haarlem.

Henk Pander, “Winter”
“My brother Jan had not regained his birth weight 3 months after his birth. Now middle-aged he still suffers the consequences. Our family doctor had polio in his youth and was an intimidating, frightening character to me.”

Henk Pander, “The Raid”
“At night, high in the sky, waves of bombers flew over our house on the way to bomb German cities. I watched out my bedroom window at the Nazi searchlights close by.”

Henk Pander, “The Father”
“British light bombers flew low over the old city. The Father, frightened that a German ammunition dump was about to explode, threw himself on his small child to protect him.”

Henk Pander, “Grace Before Meat” (17th Century Painting Title)
“On the black market, my father bought what he thought was a rabbit, but we always suspected it was a cat.”

Henk Pander, “Spilled Milk”
“In the countryside farmers protested the taking of their sons and hired help to fight against the Russians by dumping their milk, the so-called “Milk Strike.” There were reprisals. My aunt pleaded with the Nazis to let my Uncle go. To warn the neighbors against non-compliance, Nazi soldiers would shoot the resistors against the walls of their own farms.”

Henk Pander, “The Viaduct”
“A resistance group shot a collaborator policeman under a nearby viaduct at the train station. Later, my father was forced to walk guard there. The resistance partisans were two young girls, later near the end of the war, they were executed in the dunes after digging their own graves.”

Henk Pander, The Kitchen
“We lived next door to a Catholic hospital. The Franciscans had taken a liking and concern for my family, my parents and five small children, during the famine. They would boil some potatoes and add some grease. One day, my father and my little sister, Gesa, went to the hospital kitchen to pick up the pan with food. Suddenly, German soldiers burst in, looking for someone in hiding there. They pointed at my dad and said, “That is him.” The monk replied, “That is our nice neighbor, not who you are looking for.” My father’s fate was decided between Church and State.”